Per H. Christensen, Wojciech Jarosz
Abstract:
Path tracing is one of several techniques to render photorealistic
images by simulating the physics of light propagation within a
scene. The roots of path tracing are outside of computer graphics, in
the Monte Carlo simulations developed for neutron transport. A great
strength of path tracing is that it is conceptually, mathematically,
and often-times algorithmically simple and elegant, yet it is very
general. Until recently, however, brute-force path tracing techniques
were simply too noisy and slow to be practical for movie production
rendering. They therefore received little usage outside of academia,
except perhaps to generate an occasional reference image to validate
the correctness of other (faster but less general) rendering
algorithms. The last ten years have seen a dramatic shift in this
balance, and path tracing techniques are now widely used. This shift
was partially fueled by steadily increasing computational power and
memory, but also by significant improvements in sampling, rendering,
and denoising techniques. In this survey, we provide an overview of
path tracing and highlight important milestones in its development
that have led to it becoming the preferred movie rendering technique
today.
Paper (PDF)
Appeared as: Foundation and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision, volume 10, number 2, pages 103-175.